Advertising for Peanuts has launched Ad Mashup, a site where Art Directors can throw the creative brief and the client out the window, mashup various ads into their own personal works of art and share the results with the rest of the ad community. This is a great site to play around with while listening to your traffic manager drone on about what's due when knowing full well nothing will ever be delivered on time.

- A reader writes, "Just read on Candyaddict.com that Altoids is coming out with "chocolate dipped mints." Any truth to the rumor that they bagged Leo Burnett after that awful sour challenge campaign? That's the word..."

- Getty Images made licensing images easier (or so they say) with their new rights-ready licensing service.

- Nokia has a couple of new spots, created by Lowe Singapore, that do the whole individuality is cool, mind/body/spirit thing. (1, 2)

- In the "huh?" and "WTF" categories comes this weblog called Shoot My Blog which exists for no other reason that to solicit from people pipcture of the Shoot My Blog blog.

Alltel is running a blog ad campaign created by Campbell Ewald with site development by GMD Studios which promotes a fake class action suit against the company's My Circle calling plan. The ad points to a page on which an Edward Maxwell Von Houten claims he and many others have been added to Alltel's My Circle plan without there consent. Some witty copy turns the tables and makes the argument that paying to call your friends is better because it will eliminate turning people into gaggling idiots and somehow lead to anarchy. There's even a second site that follows the so-called class action suit.

To kick off its "behind the scenes" follow up to it Bravia Balls ad, Sony has launched a weblog, mostly written by the film crew, that will chronicle the creation of the follow up spot. The spot will be shot in Scotland and involve fireworks and thousands of gallons of paint. Based on an image of a dull, grey building posted on the blog, it would seem Sony has plans to cover the building with color as it did the streets of San Francisco. Stay Tuned.

Bud Light has created this Aborigine-like guy called Zagar and featured him on his own website and blog written by his "roommate," Steve. Videos on the site follow the the Crocodile Dundee-like, fish-out-of-water antics that come with cultural transplantation. Some of its funny. Some of its lame. The site has all the usual wallpapers, AIM icons and downloads and there's also a Flickr page and the very bloggy blog written by Steve which has all the required bloggy blog bells and whistles. So far, there are three posts that point to the three videos on the site. One wonders how long Bud Light will go to the expense of creating videos to foster blog content given that they are TV commercial quality.

We all know no one pays attention to political ads and so does WestWayne and the Ad Council which, together, have launched a PSA campaign to encourage young voters to get out and vote during the midterm elections. Maximizing the over usage of pointless political platitudes, the ads call attention to the very thing many political ads generate: apathy. At the same time, the ads point out the downside of apathy with the tagline, "If you're not voting then who are you electing?" See them all here.

The television PSAs are accompanied by radio ads as well as a website which will host all sorts of goodies such as ringtones, podcasts, e-cards and blogs for each of the mock candidates.

Movie Marketing Madness tells the story of John Campea who runs The Movie Blog and his recent run in with Paramount. John had been hyping the Paramount movie [name withheld so as not to provide any undeserved publicity] by talking about the production of the film and posting images from the production. Like a bunch of clueless idiots, Paramount execs did some very silly things. First, they asked John to remove a couple pictures from his site. John complied after making sure Paramount wanted to remove this publicity from the million people who read his blog. Yes, they did and so he removed them. Then the next morning, he found his site down which he later realized was due to a cease and desist letter sent from Paramount to his hosting company complaining about a third picture which Paramount never notified him about.

- ClickZ's Rebecca Lieb takes a look at the current state of social networking and rightly concludes three things: It's not new and it's been around since the Internet was born. MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are far from the only social networks out there. And the hot social networks of today will almost definitely not be the hot ones of tomorrow.

- Commenting on Chef One Dumplings becoming the Official Dumplings of New York's Brooklyn Cyclones. George Parker thinks the whole "official fill-in-the-blank of fill-in-the-blank" thing is stupid.

If the premise of Ford's new Bold Moves documentary, which promises to rip the bullshit out of the company, holds true, the company may actually live up to the promise of its new "Bold Moves" ad campaign. The online documentary series promises an unfettered look inside the company and how it plans to return to profitability by 2008. The first episode of the series recounts Ford's glory days but very quickly admits its tenuous position in the face of superior foreign automotive companies which continue to take more and more market share. With the documentary, Ford promises to tell the honest story of how it will engineer its own comeback.

After receiving an email from Sinuate Media, a company that represents a project for Twix, Andrew Krucoff, publisher of the ad-free blog Young Manhattanite, decided to sell out. He was contacted by Sinuate Media's Justin Chiang who asked Krucoff to post banners promoting a sweepstakes in return for a bunch of free candy bars and some MLB tickets. Apparently a lover of candy, Krucoff caved at agreed to post the banner. So much for the ad-free blog concept.